THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - Ecology and Art History

CATSKILL - With an illustration by Karl Anshanslin

Let’s learn a little ecology and then work it into the things that we have been writing about lately. That ecology is a principle that ecologists have long called the “edge effect.” It postulates that where two ecologies border each other then there is usually a bit of an overlap. That overlap is called an ecotone. Because of that, the overlap zone displays species from both ecologies and that results in the highest biodiversity’s of the region. So, this overlap is, in short, good. The most commonly cited example is when meadows abut forests. See our first illustration, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Both plant and animal species from within the two ecologies are found side by side in that ecotone. That’s an enriched ecology. And again, as we said, that is good. Take a quick look at our second illustration (contributed by Karl Anshanslin) and don’t read the words. That’s the ecotone in the center and you can see how diverse it is; the symbols represent species, and they are so dense in the ecotone.

But this is supposed to be a geology column, so, where are we going in all this? Well, look at our second illustration again and this time read the words. Now you will see that we are using the edge effect to produce a metaphor. We are portraying an overlap between two different categories of thought – the thinking of art historians and the thinking of ice age geologists. That’s a pretty curious intellectual ecotone, isn’t it? This is not an ecotone of enriched biodiversity. No, it is an ecotone of enriched thinking. And yes, that’s where we are going on all this.

We have been occupying this strange ecotone a lot lately. The two of us have been studying paintings done in our region by artists of the Hudson River School of Art. We have been working out the ice age histories of these landscape images and publishing the results as columns right here in the Mountain Eagle. And, oh by the way, we recently published a book about this too. This has been, indeed, enriched thinking. We know of no one who has done similar work. And we are going to continue on this theme in future columns. And we are thinking about going into other such ecotones as well. Keep reading our columns.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page, “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”